MOSCOW, August 16. /TASS/. Ukrainian troops have shelled containers with nuclear waste at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, with one of shells exploding ten meters of such container, Vladimir Rogov, a member of the Zaporozhye region military-civilian administration’s council, said on Tuesday.
"One of the guided shells hit the ground ten meters of them (containers with nuclear waste - TASS). Others fell down slightly further - 50 and 200 meters. As the storage area is open, a shell or a rocket may unseal containers and kilograms, or even hundreds of kilograms of nuclear waste will be emitted in the environment and contaminate it. To put it simply, it will be a ‘dirty bomb,’" he said in an interview with the Solovyov Live television channel.
According to Rogov, another vulnerable place is the plant’s cooling systems, which are also targeted by Ukrainian troops. Any malfunction or damage to the cooling systems are fraught with a disaster, whereas the nuclear unit as such can be destroyed only by tactical nuclear weapons.
Located in the city of Energodar, the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant is controlled by Russian troops. In recent days, Ukrainian forces delivered several strikes at its territory using unmanned aerial vehicles, heavy artillery and multiple rocket launch systems. It most cases, such attacks are repelled by air defense systems but several shells hit infrastructure facilities and the vicinity of the nuclear waste storage.